Circle of Hell

THE ITALIAN GIRL by Iris Murdoch. 213 pages. Viking. $4.50.

A reader is never safe with Iris Murdoch. What she best enjoys doing--and does better than any writer now working--is setting traps for her readers, baited with wit and camouflaged with urbane prose that all but conceals the bite of a gleefully seditious mind.

Her eighth novel opens on a scene of quiet domestic sorrow. Edmund Narroway, an early-middle-aged bachelor, has returned to the drab coal-mining town in northern England where he grew up, to attend the funeral of his widowed mother. Waiting for him are his brother Otto, a sculptor, his sister-in-law Isabel, and his teen-age niece Flora, whose "face had that pure, transparent look which we suddenly notice in the faces of young girls when they are no longer children." Suddenly, at the crematory, Edmund sees the polite fabric of their shared grief rapped apart by Brother Otto: "I thought for a moment that he was ill or overcome by tears: but then I saw that he was laughing. He choked. Then, abandoning all attempt at concealment, he went off into a fit of Gargantuan mirth. He laughed. He roared. The chapel echoed with it. Our communion was at an end."

Sexual Gavotte. The shocked Edmund returns home with the family, and Otto retreats in a drunken stupor to his studio. Isabel pleads with Edmund to stay with them ("You are the only person who can heal us"). But Edmund, already suspecting that "there was no dignity, no simplicity in their lives," decides to leave by the afternoon train. "Perhaps you're right," says Isabel. "It's just that I'm caged, bored. I want emotion and pistol shots."

In the garden after lunch, Flora confides to Edmund's shocked ears that she is pregnant and asks him to find her an abortionist. He decides to stay and help her--and soon learns that there is enough unfettered emotion in the house to satisfy even bored sister-in-law Isabel. The inhabitants mix, mate and mismate in a series of scabrous sexual exercises as complicated as a gavotte. Otto confesses that he has been sleeping with the sister of his young assistant, a Russian Jew named David Levkin. ("Otto is a wet-lipped man, I am a dry-lipped man," says Edmund primly.) And Levkin, it turns out, has deliberately made Flora pregnant in order to arouse the jealousy of Isabel, who is his mistress and insanely in love with him.

Comfort & Commitment. As blow after blow falls, Edmund begins to doubt his sanity and to lose his control. Scarcely realizing his intention, he makes a clumsy pass at Flora and is discovered by Levkin, who jeers: "You are a buffoon just like your brother but you don't even know it! He, at least, knows that he is a perfectly ludicrous animal." In desperation, Edmund turns for comfort to his old nurse, the Italian girl of the title. "I haven't touched a woman in years!" he shouts. "No girls at all?" she asks. "And no boys either?"

Finally, even Edmund grasps the simple truth that he is sick with jealousy: "Yet surely I did not want to be inside such a circle of hell." Ironist Murdoch finally releases her chastened innocent --but not before she is sure that he has been "broken and made simple," as the other characters have been, "by the real nature of the world." A commitment to life of any kind, her sly moral seems to say, is better than a refusal to live at all.

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